A certifiable paranoiac would have a high old time tracing out the
patterns behind the global warming campaign of the past month. The
effort has the feel of something long planned, well scripted, and
worked out to the final detail. It's hard to avoid thoughts of
conspiracy when contemplating the activities of the Greens.

Not that it's necessary to believe any such thing. (In analyzing
cases like this, I apply Dunn's First Law: With enough idiots, you
don't need a conspiracy.) It's part of the natural order -- birds
flock, insects swarm, and Greens campaign. But the actual point is,
whether carefully-hatched scheme, herd instinct, or sheer accident,
it's clear at this juncture that the effort has failed.

Let's take a closer look at those patterns. First we have the release
of the International Panel on Climate Change "report" (still referred
to that way throughout the legacy media, despite the fact that the
actual report isn't due out for several months yet). This was
followed by weeks of mounting hysteria in every possible media
outlet, culminating in AlGore's Norma Desmond moment at the Oscars.
Then at last, the universal sigh of relief as the climate program
telling us exactly what we need to do to save ourselves was presented
to the UN by 18 (count 'em, 18 -- all mainstream, too!) scientists.

The big report you never heard about

What's that? You didn't catch that last part? Neither did anybody
else. (Notice that the link leads to the Voice of America, the only
site where I could find a complete report, and not the New York Times
or Washington Post) And that's an odd thing. The entire effort was
obviously building up to the revelation of What Must Be Done, to be
delivered in tones of thunder to a world agonized to the breaking
point. Instead it comes across as the standard piece of useless UN
paper - of the type dealing with fisheries policy in the Maldives or
primary schooling in Slovakia.

But this particular report went effectively uncovered, unmentioned,
and ignored - an awfully strange response to the solution to the most
terrifying threat in human history. Clearly, something went wrong. If
the campaign had been a success, it would have been covered, all
right - as much as the IPCC summary and then some. Al would have been
at the UN. So would Hillary, Chuck, and Nancy, more than likely.
There would have been speeches, and plenty of them. Parked SUV's
would have been trashed all around Manhattan. Somebody would have
pointed out that Turtle Bay would in short order be twenty, or forty,
or sixty feet underwater.

None of that happened - the unveiling of the grand solution was a
complete washout. (And what was the solution? Umm... carbon taxes
and... I forget.)

With a failure as abject as this, there's no simple means of
recovery. The entire effort to sell anthropogenic global warming will
have to be redone from scratch.

Look for another buildup when the actual IPCC report is released
sometime this Spring. It's a good thing they can't do the Academy
Awards all over again.

Three major factors are responsible for the Green's failure:

* The weather
* AlGore
* Science

Bad timing: a seasonal obsession

The weather is the key factor, the one that rendered it impossible to
push the warming thesis as an accomplished fact. The IPCC report was
released during the first days of the worst six weeks of weather in
several decades.

While the UN, Al, and the media jabbered about how hot it was
getting, the rest of the northern hemisphere was digging out of
blizzards, enduring colder temperatures than any in recent memory
(this was the worst run of continuous low temperatures I have seen
personally since the infamous "ice age winter" of 1975), and in some
cases simply trying to live through it. Europe was hit by killer
blizzards, one of which shut down all of southeastern England. Japan,
China, and Korea suffered bone-chilling readings. Cambodia was
treated to temperatures of an unthinkable 40 degrees Fahrenheit,
prompting the distribution of blankets to the poor. The central and
northern U.S. went through weeks of below-freezing temperatures, (two
and half weeks here in western PA), with much of the rest of the
country enduring less than normal levels. Excessive snow, often
reaching blizzard heights, added to everyone's pleasure. Some are
still going fighting their way through it - on March 1, Governor
Culver <http://www.woi'tv.com/Global/story.asp?S=6163003>declared all
of Iowa a disaster area after an extra foot of snow fell
in one 24-hour period.

The result was a general popular tacit dismissal of "global warming"
talk as elitist nonsense, something to occupy the time of people who
don't have to dig out their sidewalks, free their cars, or rescue
stranded travelers.

Of course, weather is not climate - but the distinction is
irrelevant, as far as public attitudes are concerned.

And as has been pointed out here previously, there is a direct
correlation to global warming as a scientific proposition. The most
plausible warming models predict that the bulk of temperature rises
will occur during the winter in high latitudes.

After thirty-odd years of uninterrupted warming, we should be seeing
some sign of this, and not a return to bitter mid-70s winters.

This is a case where the public mind is correct even when it's wrong.

The possibility of something like this could have been foreseen.
February, after all, is the generally the coldest month of the year.
Could it be that the IPCC release was arranged by a UN bureaucrat
from a tropical country, one not all that familiar with northern
weather patterns? Whatever the case, the lesson to draw from this is:
don't put out your global warming material in mid-winter in the
Northern Hemisphere industrialized countries.

AlGore

The second factor is something vaster and more certain than mere
weather or climate: AlGore's arrogance.

The problem is that they were being purchased from Generation
Investment Management -- chairman, AlbertGore, Jr. In other words, Al
was paying Al for the privilege of wasting electricity. It's as if
Gandhi had been photographed inside his ashram wearing spats and a
waistcoat and sipping Boodles gin. From now on all the little
gestures - riding in the hybrid limo, having the private jet pilot
sign the carbon offset certificate, and for all we know, touring the
North American continent in a solar-powered blimp - are going to look
just the slightest bit hollow.

Gore can't help this. He was born to make the wrong move at the
absolute worst time. Any doubts about that are erased by two even
more recent incidents: sneaking
<http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Gore_Airport_Security.html>his
party past security at Nashville airport ("It's okay, they know me
here..."), and, as Iowa was being shut down by the worst blizzards
since the retreat of the glaciers, giving his customary warming
Jeremiad to a crowd in Oklahoma only a few hundred miles south.

What this means is that the Greens will have to cultivate a new
messiah. Gore's campaign will continue, and media inertia being what
it is (don't you feel sorry for all those people predicting his run
for the presidency in '08?) he'll get plenty of coverage. But his
effectiveness as a spokesman for the Green cause is nil. AlGore has
once again become what he was after his post-2000 election tantrum --
a joke. And while there are second acts in American lives, pushing
for a third is really tempting the fates.

The Science

The final element is science - namely, its lack of respect for
anybody's opinion, even that of its own most mainstream elements.
"The debate is over" was supposed to be one of those catchphrases
that enters common usage and sweeps all resistance before it, like
"Women don't lie" or "We want change".

But even as the warming campaign was unfolding, we were given a clear
demonstration that science never produces final answers.

Over the past month, two scientific challenges to the warming thesis
were made public, one of them speculative, the other damning.

The speculative aspect is provided by a
<http://www.americanthinker.com/cgi-bin/at-admin/www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,220341,00.html>theory
advanced by Danish astrophysicist Henrik Svensmark of the Center for
Sun-Climate Research. Svensmark's theory is complex, but can be
summarized easily enough. It is based on the observation that cosmic
rays assist in cloud formation by encouraging condensation. A rise in
solar activity strengthens the sun's magnetic field, which shields
the inner solar system from cosmic rays. Cloud formation drops
slightly but significantly, lowering the earth's albedo - its
reflectivity - resulting in increased temperatures.

Solar activity is currently at all-time high, with the intensity of
incoming cosmic rays correspondingly low. Have rising temperatures
been a mere coincidence? Svensmark doesn't think so, and has
convinced one of Britain's premier science writers, Nigel Calder, to
collaborate with him on a book,
<http://www.amazon.com/Chilling'Stars'Theory'Climate'Change/dp/1840468157/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102'9354081'0153757?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173066426&sr=1'1>The
Chilling Stars, not yet published in the U.S.

Spencer points out a glaring omission in nearly all climatology
dealing with warming: a complete neglect of the phenomenon of
precipitation. Spencer explains that precipitation lowers
atmospheric temperature, with effects on the climate in general that
remain unknown. The lack of consideration of precipitation in the
global warming model is a gross error, on the level of putting the
wrong lenses on the Hubble Telescope or confusing metric and English
measurements while constructing the lost Mars probe.

How much is overall temperature lowered by precipitation? We don't know.

Svensmark's theory remains to be tested, and the data concerning the
effects of precipitation need to be collated and analyzed. But their
implications cannot be ignored.

The fact that two such major elements, one cosmic, one prosaic, have
been overlooked undercuts the warming thesis completely.

The warming theorist's obsession with carbon dioxide buildup - only
one factor in an infinitely complex system - has blinded them to
everything else.

They're in the position of a pack of hounds so intent on the rabbit
that they missed the cliff edge right in front of them.

It's heartening to see that the Greens, whether technical, political,
or media, have retained their basic ineptness. They're such
cookie-cutter true believers that they really can't grasp how they
can go wrong or why anyone wouldn't listen to them.

As a result they begin their push in the middle of winter, choose the
current prince of the also-rans as their champion (such individuals,
who include figures such as Wendell Wilkie and Hubert Humphrey, can
often go on to make serious and valuable contributions. But not this
time.), and ignore the fact that science marches on without regard to
anybody's agenda.

The campaign will continue. We'll be hearing about global warming
until the glaciers return, the same way we occasionally still hear a
few frightened voices crying about overpopulation, in a world where
population collapse is the challenge.

The Greens may pass some taxes, get some cosmetic programs pushed
through, but the idea of a Green millennium, of some kind of
apocalyptic phase-change resulting in a global environmentalist
state, is something we can forget about.

They had their shot, and they have blown it.

The past few weeks could serve well as a textbook example of how not
to influence public opinion.

In time (and it can't be soon enough), global warming will take its
place in the museum of folly alongside overpopulation, nuclear
winter, and the coming ice age. There aren't any spotlights there,
and they don't give out prizes either.